1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and method capable of form overlay printing by overlaying a form pattern and a character pattern, and a memory medium storing an information processing program adapted for use therein.
2. Related Background Art
In the case of printing a form overlay pattern (for example as shown in FIG. 12) obtained by overlaying a form pattern (for example the form of a proposal document for improvement as shown in FIG. 11) and form data (for example a character pattern consisting of plain text data), it has conventionally been required that the font and the print format of the form data are fixed.
For example, the character patterns of the form data, to be printed in the form pattern (for example the form of a proposal document for improvement as shown in FIG. 11) have a same size.
In the conventional form overlay print control system, an exclusive form information design system can be utilized in the designing of form information and a highly advanced form can be designed with various components such as a line portion, an arc, a solid colored area and plural character fonts, but the form data to be printed thereon (for example character patterns consisting of plain text data) can only utilize a single character font.
Although the printing apparatus has acquired various functions by the recent technological advancement and has become capable of printing various character fonts, the conventional form overlay print control system can only utilize fixed character font and fixed print format for the form data, and such form data (for example character patterns consisting of plain text data) are overlaid, utilizing a space code, a tabulator code, a line feed code, a new page code etc., in a predetermined position on the form pattern (for example the form of a proposal document for improvement).
Such conventional form overlay print control system has been associated with a drawback in that it has been incapable of mixing form data of plural character attributions in the form pattern, in order to partially emphasize the form data.
Also in the conventional information processing system, there is known a printing technology called overlay printing, in which a form consisting of vertical and horizontal form lines is registered in advance in a printer, whereby the form data to be printed in such form and the registered form are printed in an overlaid format.
In such conventional overlay printing, however, it is necessary to register the form in advance in the printer prior to the printing of the form data, and such registering operation is cumbersome.
Also in such conventional overlay printing, the form data cannot be utilized for generating other form data. More specifically, it is not possible to automatically generate new form data by arbitrarily combining the already entered plural form data according to the purpose, so that the form data cannot be utilized again.
Consequently, in case of overlay printing of form data groups of A+B+C+D+E+F . . . and A+B+C+d+e+f . . . , it is necessary to enter the form data A+B+C every time, so that the input of the form data is cumbersome.
Also in the case of using an application program on a computer system and printing the result of processing, there have been encountered following drawbacks.
As an example, let us consider a case of preparing an application program for managing a personal address list, and printing an address report consisting of print data of "name", "telephone number" and "address". After the printing of a line of a "name" and a corresponding "address", if the "name" on a next line has the same "address", it is often desired to print "ibid." for the address. Since the conventional printing apparatus can only print the print data prepared by the user, such requirement has been met by increasing the burden of development of each application program. Also in the above-mentioned example, if it is desired to print "same as above" instead of "ibid.", it is likewise necessary to individually amend the application program, so that there is required increased maintenance work for the application program.